Freelance Writer

Lurking beneath the gleaming white surface of the Amazon's product pages, there is a teeming reef of retailer life—two million independent sellers, who together made up nearly half of the web giant's retail sales. And yet we barely get a glimmer of them. Who lives in that ecosystem down there? How do they make ends meet? Helm spent a few months trailing a group of these so-called Marketplace vendors in Queens, New York to find out.